Some Young Dads Have To Grow Into Fatherhood

Being A Parent Is Much Harder Than Becoming One, So Programs Stress One Important `R': Responsibility

May 23, 1994|By Steve Johnson, Tribune Staff Writer.

He professes love for the baby's mother: "She's my best friend." Moments later, though, he says of the baby: "I'm pretty sure it's mine, but girls are shifty."

In the voices of young parents, there is confusion and often a maddening, laissez-faire quality, an almost unfathomable willingness to surrender their lives to outside forces.

Ingram says that about the time he learned his girlfriend was pregnant, he did make one important decision about paternity: Good fathers don't deal dope.

"Everyone I know sells drugs," he says. "Too many of my friends get killed, go to jail for a long time. I can't be no role model for my child if I'm in jail."

Ingram says he hopes to get a place with his girlfriend and their child once they can scare up enough money. Marriage to him is a maybe-sometime proposition at best. But his unwitting baby, unlike the hundreds of thousands of others born illegitimate each year, may at least get a chance at the stability and attention that comes from having two parents around.

Still, since its inception, the Teen Father Program has worked with only about 1,000 men, a figure that is barely a drop in even one city's lake of illegitimacy.

Ballard, a soft-spoken 57-year-old who grew up without a father in Alabama, wants to take the program national-hence the name-but he has standards for his counselors that critics contend may thwart his ambition. They may not drink or use drugs; they may not smoke; they may not be homosexual; they may not have sex outside of marriage. Ballard asks the same things of the young men with whom he works.

The problem he is dealing with is "unreasonable," Ballard says, so therefore "we must be unreasonable."

In Chicago, Joseph Mason says he sometimes feels like he's banging his head against a wall, sometimes like he is part of something that approaches a solution.

"Men do want to participate. They do want to help their children," says Mason, director of one of the three Chicago sites of the Paternal Involvement Demonstration Program, initiated by the Illinois Department of Public Aid. "They don't want to make babies and flee."

Still, helping them do so, Mason acknowledges, "hasn't been a piece of cake."

"It's been difficult to get the men to open up, difficult to get them to come," he says.

The men meet in a group on Monday nights. "Every other Monday, I don't care what it is, I've got a packed house," Mason says.

The reason?

"I feed 'em."

To help the men get to the program's Loop office, Mason provides them with public-transportation tokens, the only other monetary incentive. Some of the men have been caught selling the tokens. And even among the more motivated men, some aren't prepared to handle the help they get.

"I've had 20 of my men employed. Twelve of them are working now," Mason says. "They're really mostly those men that everyone else has forgotten about."

On a Monday night in March, a night when dinner is not provided, nine men sit in a circle taking turns summarizing Newsweek articles about Louis Farrakhan, blacks and Jews. When they are asked to write letters to the editor in reaction, several immediately take to the task, while several sit with arms folded. One asks, "The editor, is he Jewish?"

Reading is just one of the remedial skills that Mason says he has learned it is necessary to teach. Another is being able to see the big picture: that maybe it's worth it to let a boss talk down to you because the bigger goal is to provide for your child.

For Chaunnetta White and Terrell Adams, the Chicago program has helped restore a relationship that was on the rocks, despite their two children together.

White was in her late teens when she and Adams, a graduate of Dunbar High School, first conceived. The two were together for the birth of their children, Terrell Jr., 5, and Lonell, 4.

"It kind of happened. I did want kids, but not that soon," Adams says. "We stayed together for a while, but things just didn't work out."

The trouble, as in so many relationships, was money. Adams lost a job and confidence in his role in the family.

"She said she didn't want me to come back, see the kids, because I didn't have nothing to offer," he says. "I felt myself I wasn't doing what I should be doing."

Part of the problem, he admits, was his immaturity: "I used to be, whatever money I get, I ain't sharing with nobody."

A friend put Adams in touch with the program and, at first, he was like many of the men he has seen pass through the doors: "They come in one time and say, `It's not for me."'

But Adams kept coming back, learning that there were other men in the same boat, men who wanted to be fathers but didn't know how.

"At first, I was, `Ah, I'll work it out for myself'-trying to be all solid and bold. Now, I don't have to hide it. I've never seen anything like this as far as black men coming together sharing their problems," he says.